Personally, I'd rather it be an either/or choice. I don't want to help people enforce arbitrary limits on knowledge (if you don't think it is arbitrary, consider the difference in which a partially-exposed female breast is considered on American television in comparison to images of gratuitous violence). I think the principle stands whether it is pornography or subversive politics, whether the censor is a school board in Ohio or the Ayatollah.
Practically all great works of knowledge have been at one point officially banned, including the granddaddy of encyclopedias, the Encyclopedie. We should expect to be controversial to the point of being blacklisted by some people, no matter how we try to bend backwards to accommodate. Let's not start down that path unless we have to.
FF
On 3/26/06, Philip Welch wikipedia@philwelch.net wrote:
On Mar 26, 2006, at 4:35 PM, Oskar Sigvardsson wrote:
Look we've been sown this path many times before, and it's never gotten us anywhere, infact, all it's done is make people fight and occasionally force good contributors out because of the hostile mood of the discussion (Wikipedians for decency/encyclopedic merit and WP:TOBY for instance). The fact is, far too many wikipedians think that this kind of censorship is wrong, so you'll NEVER get consensus on it. This is a discussion that should be killed before it has any chance to do more harm.
This has nothing to do with censoring Wikipedia. This is about tagging content so schools (for instance) and filtering software used by schools can discriminate between Wikipedia articles. Or would you rather Wikipedia be inaccessible in schools and libraries?
-- Philip L. Welch http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Philwelch
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